The Sisters of Summit Avenue

by Lynn Cullen

  “Poor baby!”

  “I wish I had a penny to give her.”

  June’s cup hung from her fingertips, its contents forgotten, as they pedaled away. Until that moment, she’d taken the fortress across the street, the spewing smokestack, and the moaning residents as much for granted as the grass in her yard. It was just there.

  But now she knew. The Fort Wayne School for Feeble-Minded Children was not nice. Living within view of it was not nice. She herself was not nice. She’d had an inkling that her mother was not nice—no one outside of the family would ever talk to her—and she knew from their Sunday drives down Forest Park Boulevard that her family was not rich, or even special, but she understood now that she was as pitied as her mother.

  She had no school chums over after that—maybe a boy or two, later, in high school, to challenge how much he liked her. And then she would break up with him because he knew too much.

  Now a cloud crept over her spirits as she picked along the ruts in the soot-capped snow with John. Behind the spiked iron palings, residents milled aimlessly, some stopping as abruptly as windup toys. A lone student determinedly cranked a swing.

  John waved. The student, a thick young woman in a gray coat buttoned all the way down to her work shoes, clung to rusty chains and stared.

  He saw June’s expression. “What?”

  “No one ever does that.”

  “Does what?”

  “Waves.”

  “Waves to the kids in there? Why not?” He waved again as if to make a point. The young woman’s thick features slowly animated as she lifted her fingers.

  He saluted her before turning back to June. “Poor kid. If we ever have a child like that, we’re keeping her at home. We are not going to institutionalize her. Agreed?”

  A swift pang jabbed her. He assumed she would be part of his future, his wife, the mother of his children. But she couldn’t be. As much as she adored him. As much as she felt secure and happy and like her true self around him. She was going to be somebody. No matter what. And he was just a farmer.

  She waved at the girl, who grinned as if she could not believe her good fortune. “I would never put a child in there,” June told him.

  She did not say “our” child. She glanced at him, loping through the snow next to her. Did he notice?

  She hadn’t told him why she couldn’t marry him. He hadn’t even asked her yet. But he would. They both knew he would. She had never both wanted and not wanted something so badly in her life.

  A pounding came from the direction of the schoolyard, and kept up long enough for them to locate it. On a third-story window of the institution, a girl was beating on the glass, her face mashed against the pane. She slid down, making a snail’s trail with her lips, and then was snatched from sight.

  “Good Lord!” John cried. “Shouldn’t we do something?”

  “You think that there’s something you can do?”

  He frowned at June then back up at the window. “So we’re just supposed to give up? We see things we don’t like, and we’re just supposed to forget them?”

  June started walking.

  “June, wait.” He caught up with her. “Are you all right?”

  She wasn’t all right. There was something terribly wrong with her. He wouldn’t want her if he knew. She was damaged, empty, unlovable, and unloving. Her mother was incapable of love and now she was incapable of it, too.

  He put his arm around her. She tipped her head against him.

  Please. Don’t give up on me.

  SIXTEEN

  Fort Wayne, Indiana, 1921

  At the head of the dining room table that evening, William swallowed another spoonful of canned stew. “So what does your family raise on their farm, John?”

  Dorothy lifted her sights from a peeling spot on the oilcloth and found Ruth watching June’s beau, John, from across the table. She pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose. Ruth had worn the same look when June received a doll for Christmas and Ruth had gotten a set of jacks. It had been on Ruth’s face when June won the Little Miss Sunbeam contest and all Ruth got was a loaf of bread.

  Oh, Ruthie. You can’t have him. Why do you always want what’s June’s?

  John finished his own bite of dinner. “Corn,” he told William. “Alfalfa. Oats. We have fifteen milk cows.”

  “Must keep you busy,” William said mildly.

  “Busy enough that my dad wants me to stay on the farm.”

  If her girls weren’t right in the head, it was Dorothy’s fault. She had done them damage. She had not meant to. Not having much of a background in mothering, she had tried to raise them as recommended by Dr. L. Emmett Holt in his expert book, The Care and Feeding of Children.

  She had worn the green and yellow covers of the book ragged. Dr. Holt, the “world-renowned authority on infants and children” (as it said in his book), strictly advised against playing with a baby at all before he or she was six months of age, and after that, the less playing with it, the better. He said stimulating babies made them nervous and irritable and to “suffer in many respects,” the very thought of which sent lightning bolts of terror through her.

  Dorothy had not received Dr. Holt’s book nor benefited from his knowledge until after June was a year of age. And Dorothy had played with Junie constantly when she was tiny, something Dorothy was sick about to this day. How was she to know that she wasn’t to cradle her darling, when every bone in her body had yearned to do just that?

  She did not make the same mistake with Baby Ruth. It was strictly business with Ruthie for her first six months of life, just as Dr. Holt prescribed. But by the time Dorothy felt that she could play with little Ruthie and not ruin her, Ruthie no longer wanted to play. She just stared at Dorothy as if she knew what a bad mother she was. Ruth had always been such a smart little thing.

  Now Dorothy burst out, “Better a farm than in the city!”

  Her family looked at her in surprise. She shrank a little under their gaze. “Better a farm than a city full of murderers and gangsters. They shoot people at Death Corner every day, right in front of witnesses. June’s rooms are less than a mile from there.”

  She had spent most of her adult life worrying about June. She didn’t know how to stop.

  “How do you know about Death Corner?” June asked.

  “Ruth told me.”

  “Ruth!” June exclaimed.

  Ruth was still staring at John. “What would you do if you didn’t farm?”

  He lit up. “I’d write.”

  “Write what?” Ruth asked.

  “I don’t know. That’s the hard part. A book? Magazine stories? There seems to be a big call for advertising copy, or scripts for the radio—that’s the newest thing. I’d love to be one of those fellows. But I have no connections. I don’t know how to get started.”

  William dipped a slice of store bread in his stew. “Farming’s an honest living.” He sunk his teeth into the resulting mush.

  “It is.” John shoved back his hair. “Don’t get me wrong, Mr. Dowdy. I love working with the land—our piece has been in the family for generations. But I’ve been putting words together since I was a boy—I can’t help myself. What I’d like to write most is a novel, if I could.”

  “He’s really talented,” June said with authority. “All of his letters—” She paused to look at Ruth, as if making sure that she understood that he wrote to her often. “—all of his letters are so clever.”

  John scowled, a midwesterner’s thank-you.

  “I don’t see why you don’t just write books,” said Ruth, “and run the farm.”

  John turned to look at her, as did June. As did Dorothy. Was that rouge on Ruth’s cheeks? For crying out loud—was that June’s good sweater she had on?

  “How did you two meet?” William asked.

  “At the Art Institute.” June laid her hand on his arm. “It was his first visit to Chicago, and seeing art was at the top of his list. My kind of man! We met in front of one of Mon
et’s Haystacks. This attractive stranger said he had thought that he was the only person in the world who’d ever thought that a pile of hay could look melancholy, but now here was Monet.” She looked up at him. “I told him that made three of us.”

  But he and Ruth were still staring at each other. “You’re right,” he said after a moment. “You’re absolutely right. I am just making excuses for myself. I could do both if I really wanted to.” He smiled at her. “Thanks. I needed to hear that.”

  Ruth sat back with a creak of her dining room chair, lips pursed with not-quite-squelched pride. “You’re welcome.”

  Later, when June and her beau had gone out for another walk in the dark, and Ruth had holed up in the girls’ room with a book, Dorothy had come back out to the dining room after washing the dishes, where William had his bills spread out over the oilcloth and was engrossed in his nightly torture.

  “June seems to like this boy,” Dorothy said.

  William took a card from under his pile.

  Dorothy said, “Ruth does, too.”

  William held out the card.

  “What’s this? A postcard? Who’s it from?” Dorothy’s heart jumped. Had they found her after all these years?

  In the dim light, she could make out a scene in which Model Ts and army tents were jammed together under a canopy of tall pines bearded with moss. The caption read, A “Tin Can Tourist” Camp in Florida. The back was blank.

  “I’m thinking I could get a tent, rope, stakes, and everything else we need to go camping at the Army Surplus store and then load up the truck and go.” William rubbed his hands. “Who’d make better tin-can tourists than us, right, Dorothy? I can get all the cans—maybe a little dented—that anyone could ever want.”

  Dorothy drooped, her heart still banging.

  “They call them tin-can tourists because they live on canned goods. Or because they take big cans of water with them wherever they go—that’s the other theory. I’ve put aside some of those, too. Either way, that’s us.”

  Dorothy didn’t care where the term “tin-can tourist” came from. Her dream of going to Florida did not include camping. It did feature staying in a hotel, swimming in a sparkling pool, and playing shuffleboard while wearing smoked glasses and a white cabled tennis sweater trimmed in navy blue. It featured Edward.

  “We can camp our way down to Florida,” William was saying. “Plenty of farmers will let you set up in their pasture for a dime. Some of the bigger towns have municipal campgrounds. I’ll send for a Conoco Touraide Guide and map out the trip. I’m thinking May would be a good month. How does May sound, Dorothy?”

  She still thought of Edward every day. Was he looking for her? She had not been able to keep in touch with him. He knew why.

  “I don’t want to camp,” she said.

  “We won’t be roughing it. There are showers at some of the municipal campgrounds. And you don’t have to sleep in a sleeping bag if you don’t want. I’ll give you the front seat of the truck.”

  He came over and held her. “Don’t worry, I’m going to get you to Florida, Dorothy. You are going to hear the ocean in a seashell, just like you want.” His voice rumbled in his chest as he cradled her against him. “We’re not dead yet.”

  SEVENTEEN

  Fort Wayne, Indiana, 1921

  Ruth believed that one thing June hadn’t had to learn, having her prettiness to fall back on, was what boys liked best. It wasn’t what you thought. What they craved, more than looking at a pretty girl, maybe even more than necking with one, was for girls to find them interesting.

  Ruth, a middling scorer in the looks game, had to figure this out early. It was how she’d gotten Robin. Oh, sure, she’d had to vamp a little to get Robin to look her way—you know, stare at him without flinching when he stared back, and keep her mouth slightly open like a dope. She’d learned that from the movies. It wasn’t a bad idea to make boys feel like they had a chance at what was under your sweater, either, not that they’d find much there besides Kleenex, in her case, when they looked.

  But if you really wanted to hook them, Ruth figured out when she was just sixteen, you had to listen to them. Act like you gave a rat’s rear about their stupid Bearcat. It helped if they actually had something interesting to say. Like this John who June had brought home did.

  She closed her book and stalked into the front room, to the door out which he and her sister had gone after dinner, talking and laughing. She opened it and searched the frozen night.

  Fact was, he appealed to Ruth. He was modest, he wasn’t a dummy, and he smelled good. He wanted to be a writer. He really cared about things, too, like she did. He asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up. Well, what if she wanted to be his wife?

  Oh, she knew she was being preposterous. Even discounting the fact that he would never look at a girl like her if he was sweet on someone like June, just having feelings for him made her the worst kind of traitor. June was her best friend in the world—a little soft in the head, maybe, but the very best friend, for as long as Ruth could remember. Literally. One of Ruth’s earliest memories starred June.

  What had Ruth been, two? Three? Yet Ruth could still see snatches of it in her head. There was Mother, weeding the moss roses next to the porch step. There was her hand, resting on a flagstone while she was pulling dandelions with the other.

  Up toddles Ruth. The sight of her slim, golden-skinned mother, her beautiful hand plucking through the tissuey bright blossoms, fills her with such yearning that she has to get close. She bustles up, wedges herself under her mother’s arm, and plops down.

  Crr-ack! It sounds like a stick snapping. Mother jumps up, clutching her finger.

  Ow ow ow ow ow!

  Ruth totters off. She falls down, totters off again. Bad girl! She hides herself where no one can find her—under the desk in the living room—Mother’s tinting desk—where she listens to herself cry until she falls asleep.

  She wakes to the sight of skinny legs, and then golden braids hanging down.

  June lowers her head sideways to the opening under the desk. “What are you doing?”

  Ruth can’t talk.

  “Aren’t you coming out?”

  Ruth wedges tighter against the desk.

  “Can I come in?”

  Ruth makes room.

  They crouch together under the desk. Ruth can hear the barking of the neighbor dog and the squawk pause squawk pause of the swings across the street.

  Mother’s buttoned shoes appear outside the desk. “What are you girls doing?”

  “Nothing,” they say together.

  “Touch red,” June whispers to Ruth.

  When Mother walks away, June says, “You’re supposed to say ‘touch red’ whenever you say something at the same time, or else you will have a fight. Mrs. Demetroff said so.”

  In a home that only serves canned goods, Mrs. Demetroff, the next-door neighbor lady known for giving them just-baked treats from her kitchen, is right up there with Jesus.

  “Say it—‘touch red.’ ”

  Ruth’s heart hurts with love as she gazes up at her sister. “Touch red.”

  * * *

  “Ruthie,” Dad called from the table, “could you shut the door, please? It’s cold.”

  She slammed it shut. He glanced up from working on his account books as she stomped by. “Where are you going, kitten?”

  “Nowhere.” She almost laughed. It was the truth. Unless she did something about it. Nobody was doing something about it for her.

  She skulked to the landing of the basement, where her pet rabbit, Jack, huddled in the corner of his cage. Dad had rescued Jack when he was just a blind and hairless kit, after a neighbor had mowed over his nest, and Ruth had raised him. Now he hopped to her hopefully, on the chance that Ruth would have a piece of lettuce. Poor fellow depended on Ruth to take care of him. All he knew was his cage. He wouldn’t make it out of their own backyard without a neighbor cat pouncing on him.

  She put her finger through th
e wire mesh. “What am I going to do about you?”

  But she wasn’t talking about Jack.

  EIGHTEEN

  Chicago, Illinois, 1922

  Christmas vacation had ended and June was back in school. She was lounging on the ratty silk tapestry on her roommate’s bed, studying color theory, but her eyes were not on her book. Over on the worn tapestry covering her own bed—June and her roommate had gone on a shopping spree in Chinatown last semester, further evidenced by the opened red and turquoise paper umbrellas hanging from the ceiling—John was sluicing through the heavy glossy pages of her textbook on art history. Men were forbidden in the rooms of the Three Arts Club, a brick fortress built by social reformer Jane Addams and her circle a few years earlier.

  The reformers’ idea was to provide an inexpensive safehouse for the girls from small towns and farms across the Midwest who were drawn to the Bohemian section of Chicago called Tower Town. A squeaky-clean, chaperoned artists’ colony just outside the sprawling, louche, infamous one, the Three Arts Club offered not just large rooms at a YWCA price, but plush sitting rooms, a library, a tea room, a dining room, performance stages, and bathrooms in every hall. Men weren’t allowed—definitely no men. That was the point of this cloister.

  June risked losing her fancy digs by having John in there. But there was something about this man, lying on her bed in his farmer’s go-to-town plain white shirt, black vest, and black trousers, that made her break the rules, including her own. He confused her and thrilled her and frightened her at once. She didn’t know what to do about him.

  He shut the book with a clap.

  “Oh!” She patted her throat. “You scared me!”

  He got up on his elbow. “You’re supposed to be studying.”

  She laughed. “I am. You.”

  It’s easy to bring color to a farmer’s face—just say something complimentary.

  He rested his head on his palm and pretended that he hadn’t heard. “I’ve noticed something.”

  She wished he would come over and kiss her. Her lips actually burned for it. “What?”